Press

"“This is another potential illustration of the mushy middle of automation,” Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies self-driving cars, said in an email. Partial automation systems such as Tesla’s Autopilot “work unless and until they don’t,” and there will be speculation and research about their safety, he said."

"“GM is very determined,” said Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies autonomous vehicles. “It’s clearly thought about the legal frameworks and is doing aggressive testing under difficult conditions.”"

"Although Zuckerberg has assured in recent days that in the company are examining all the contracts signed over the years with the apps on the social network to understand who and when he would give "user information" to third parties, the attention seems to be once again on the details: Facebook - maintains the privacy expert Woodrow Hartzog - «has built an incredibly profitable model, but at the same time incredibly fragile to exploit».

"The self-driving vehicle community has long discussed the potential dangers of a "Hindenberg" for self-driving vehicles, Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies self-driving cars, wrote in an email, referring to the hydrogen-filled airship’s catastrophic explosion in 1937.

"Bryant Walker Smith, assistant professor at the University of South Carolina school of law, who writes regularly on autonomous driving matters, said he was surprised by how quickly the case was settled. “I respect the family's privacy, but I also wish that the terms here were public. I associate transparency with trustworthiness, and I would encourage Uber to be more public about its process in general,” he said."

"Their paper considers a broad view of the legal definition of hacking under the CFAA, applying it even to previous work done by one of the co-authors, Yoshi Kohno. Kohno’s research, which coded DNA to hack a DNA sequencing machine could be viewed as hacking under the law, says co-author Ryan Calo.

"What Curran found is the reality that Google's millions of users face every day, said Scott J. Shackelford, an associate business professor at Indiana University focusing on cybersecurity law and policy.

"All Google users are being tracked by default in terms of physically where [they're] going and located," Shackelford said. "That is shocking to a lot of people.""

"Annemarie Bridy, a professor of intellectual property at the University of Idaho College of Law, said in an interview the ruling could stifle software innovation by opening up developers to potential liability for copyright infringement.

“This is a ruling that could have a significant chilling effect on software developers,” she said, noting that they rely on computer code like Oracle’s to make apps communicate with each other."

""The FTC was never created as a pure data protection authority, but it's stepped in to fill the void," said Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University. "Even after all the FTC has done, it's still very limited in substantive authority and in terms of resources.""

"This may be the first true large-scale reckoning for the information age, a 21st-century problem screaming for an immediate answer. Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern and an affiliate scholar at The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, has a suggestion.

"“There hasn’t been a real vivid example of how information is extracted on a massive scale and then weaponized against you,” said Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “To rob people of agency in a really important, core area of identity, which is political expression, ideology—the idea that we’ve lost control of so much, to lose this as well is just difficult to swallow.”"

"“On two separate occasions, the driver seems to be looking down at something for nearly five seconds,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a leading legal expert in the arena of autonomous vehicle deployment. “At 37 miles per hour, a car covers about 250 feet in 5 seconds.”"

"As Malkia Cyril, the executive director of the Oakland-based Center for Media Justice and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net), told Truthout this week, "Data protection is not about protecting privacy; it never was. It's about protecting democracy. Now, more than ever, the US needs civil rights legislation that protects the data of vulnerable communities.""

"Richard Forno, assistant director of University of Maryland, Baltimore County's Center for Cybersecurity, said that while he doesn't think Congress is best-suited to regulate tech companies, he doesn't expect that regulations would trigger a mass flight of users nor advertisers. "Advertisers will just find another way to adapt," Forno said.

""The victim did not come out of nowhere. She's moving on a dark road, but it's an open road, so Lidar and radar should have detected and classified her" as a human, Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies autonomous vehicles told the Associated Press.

Smith said the video may not show the complete picture, but "this is strongly suggestive of multiple failures of Uber and its system, its automated system, and its safety driver.""

"“One place where we could start would be with a uniform and robust data breach notification standard that’s not watered down and has penalties,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in internet privacy and free speech online. Such a law would require that consumers and the government be swiftly alerted when their data has been stolen in a hack or landed somewhere without users’ consent.

"But Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington’s law school, who writes regularly on robotics and cyber law, said in a tweet: “I watched the video of the driverless car collide with Ms Herzberg and I simply disagree that it absolves Uber.” Both Prof Calo and Bryant Walker Smith, assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s law school and an expert on autonomous vehicles, said that the Uber vehicle’s array of sensors and camera equipment, which include a Lidar system that sends out laser pulses to “see” its surroundings, should have detected Ms Herzberg, given h